The official site of Italy's central bank

No. 18 - Italian National Accounts, 1861-2011

A great deal of new quantitative research has been produced over the last three decades which has radically changed the received interpretation of Italian economic development. Against this backdrop, the Bank of Italy, Istat and the University of Rome "Tor Vergata", together with academics from other institutions, developed a project to estimate new historical national accounts time series. Our reconstruction covers the 150 years following the political unification of Italy and is based on the most up-to-date results in the literature. It provides estimates of supply and uses at constant and at current prices. The documentation could not be reported fully in the following few pages. The details will be presented in full in a book to be published in the coming months, coauthored by all who contributed to the enterprise. In this paper I draw a general picture of the new time series. I focus on historically significant periods, using them as case studies in order to illustrate some features of the new data, both technical and substantial. A detailed, if incomplete, methodological account of our work is given in the appendices.